This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

Study after study has
shown that black men do more time in jail than white men who commit
similar crimes — an entrenched racial disparity in the nation’s justice
system that Attorney General Eric Holder has decried as “shameful” and
unacceptable.

But a new study finds that a
previously ignored factor has an even larger impact than race on whether
and for how long a person will go to jail: U.S. citizenship.

Immigrants who lack citizenship
are four times more likely to be sent to jail than U.S. citizens who
committed the same crimes, according to a study of federal sentencing
data to be published in the American Sociological Review this month.
Once they’re in jail, immigrants serve two to four months longer than
the average citizen convicted of the same crime.

This sentencing gap between
citizens and noncitizens is even larger than ones found between black
defendants and white defendants, according to Michael T. Light, the
study’s author and an assistant professor of sociology at Purdue
University. Lacking citizenship appears to be worse news for a defendant
than his or her race. A white noncitizen faces more jail time, on
average, than a black U.S. citizen convicted of the same crime, the
study found.

Citizenship “appears to trump
race and ethnicity when determining punishments for those who violate
U.S. law,” the study concludes. The effect was starkest for undocumented
immigrants, but even legal immigrants faced significantly longer
sentences than citizens convicted of the same crimes, regardless of
their race. Most of the sentencing disparity between Hispanics and
whites could be explained by the higher percentage of noncitizens in the
Hispanic group, the study found.

The sentencing gap appears to have grown with the size of the
noncitizen population of the country, which has expanded to about 38
million people. Noncitizens make up more than a quarter of the country’s
federal inmates. They are generally deported once their sentence is up.
Most noncitizens in prison are serving time for federal immigration
crimes, but the researchers examined only non-immigration offenses
committed by noncitizens to be able to compare them to the same crimes
committed by citizens.

It’s unclear why noncitizens are punished more severely by the
courts. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that undocumented
immigrants have a right to due process — and legal immigrants should be
treated the same by the law. Light theorizes that the disparity might be
a reflection of public opinion. A majority of Americans say in polls
that they believe immigrants are likely to cause higher crime rates.
This perception of higher criminality could result in harsher
punishments.

Holder has called racial disparities in sentencing "unacceptable" and
has launched a series of reforms aimed at rolling back mandatory
minimums for drug crimes in order to combat them. It’s unclear if these
reforms would help close the citizen-noncitizen gap as well, Light said.

“Any policy aimed at avoiding unwarranted disparities is a good
thing,” he said. “It’s not that we shouldn’t focus on race and
ethnicity, but that we should also include nationality.”